After a long time, Albertson’s is finally Lucky’s again. But neither is really the original Lucky’s , instead it’s a cloaked version of Save Mart. Well, here’s the history according to Wikipedia, if you’re interested.
Myself, I still find myself drawn to Safeway — although Safeway has a sordid past too. Just goes to show, when it comes to business and sausage, don’t ask how it all works or is made.
In a previous post, wrote about a common camera repair horror story.
I just received the Sony DSC-T9 back from repair. It is still broken in exact same way as when I sent it in. Power off, power on, and it asks to set date and time again. Since it’s the fourth time in 90 days the unit has been in repair w/o success, the customer service rep. suggested that they request their Sony liason to get a replacement from Sony. No guarantee that that it would be approved by Sony, but I guess a case could be made. Read the rest of this entry »
Shane Nickerson wrote over a year ago about his experience with Sony warranty service. Well, it hasn’t gotten any better as I have been struggling (patiently) with Sony’s outsourced repair service (Precision Camera Repair) for the last 8 weeks. They are doing the repair free of charge, but they just aren’t doing a good job of it. It is going back for repair for the third time in a row.
Is it any wonder that albertsons will be – i am assuming that they can’t fight the market reality – selling itself off?
According to the article here, they have a lot of competition, and suffered from a 20 week strike last year.
But more importantly, I think, since then they haven’t improved what matters to customers, so they won’t gain or even retain any customers. I found myself shopping at albertson’s yesterday because of its familiar location, and then reminded myself, “Why did I come here again? I usually choose go to Safeway”
The local albertson’s has a total of two checkers at peak hours and usually only one most of the other times of day. The store itself still has 8 or 9 fully equipped checkstands. It also has 4 self-service check-out terminals where there’s a line due to the software locking up waiting for a checker to come over and reset it, and due to shoppers just being entertained by the animated graphics.
I’m sure they could sell a lot more food if they could get customers out of the store faster.
I think what happened after the strike is that they put in automated terminals to protect against future labor disputes, while also laying off workers to control costs. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of a downward spiral, since with less workers to help customers, the customers get fed up and go elsewhere, causing revenues to drop again.
Went to Ikea’s sales-tax free sale, but wound up leaving without buying anything. There a couple of good reasons for this:
and less practically,
“To create a neutral color scheme in a room, use a range of “un-colors” like brown, beiges, gray, taupes, and whites.” – Furnishing your first home
It seems I get at least 2 or 3 faked messages a day from Paypal and eBay which are – ironically for reasons i will soon explain – are the same company. The claims are that my account will be suspended or has been accessed illegally or might have been compromised and that I need to provide my login info again to avoid being deactivated.
It seems these problems persist and aren’t being addressed by eBay or PayPal because:
What are some fixes:
Well, this has only been going on for about a year now (as of march 2005). I suspect nothing will be done about it. Ironically, the three phishing scams I know about: eBay, PayPal, and washington mutual, two of them are attacking the same company and that same company is not doing anything about either of them.
Other people talking about this:
Update for 2005-Jul-20:
It appears that ebay is communicating as of June, 2005 via its ‘my ebay’ portal, but the existence of those messages aren’t communicated via email and they expire, so if you don’t log in for a month, your messages will have disappeared. But it is a good step taken that’s a long time coming.
As someone who has not had a landline phone number since 1997 (more than 7 years), the thought of someone refusing to do business with me because of this is offensive. The fact that this corporate policy has persisted for almost two years with little desire to respond to customer demand is amazing. I have contacted Domino’s customer service and am waiting for an ‘official response’.
Domino’s pizza corporate policy is that it “doesn’t accept orders from cell phones” because drivers have “gotten beaten up when delivering orders placed by cell phones”. They require you to provide a telephone number that looks like a landline phone number. However, during a recent phone call, they will accept any old phone number, even one for a city 40 miles away, so the corporate policy isn’t acheiving its intended goal anyway.
For instance, you could pick any phone number from the telephone book and still place an order from your cell phone if you turn caller id blocking on.
Lastly, they asked for a cell phone I could be reached at in case the driver got lost and needed directions. How ironic?
Now earlier news reports say that cell phone users are ignored because the recipients don’t answer and so the pizza can’t be delivered and costs Domino’s money. Apparently, it’s not just Dominos pizza who have adopted anti-cellphone policies.
This Domino’s I ordered from apparently wasn’t part of the ones that tried accepting cellphones more graciously, or the ones that required a security form to be filled out first to make future orders easier.
I’ve been an Amazon customer since 1997. But maybe I’ll stop now.
What’s wrong with this picture:
but in reality,
That’s 6 weeks from order to estimated shipment. Of course the first estimate was 2 weeks. Shouldn’t they now be advertising 6 weeks to ship, or is that being too truthful.
Note that Amazon’s price is substantially lower than the competition, but they don’t have product.
Hey, I’ll offer you a new Lexus for $1, but you’re going to have to wait a little bit… You can wait right? Don’t buy from anyone else in the meantime…
Check out some of the comments at Reseller ratings: http://www.resellerratings.com/seller2077.html
Now that Borders has ‘teamed’ with Amazon (or rather admitted defeat to Barnes&Noble), you might consider Barnes & Noble or other booksellers.
Updated 1/20/05:
Amazon now claims 1-3 weeks estimated shipment. However asking Barnes & Noble, their distributor contacted the publisher in the UK and the publisher is not printing the book any more. The distributor won’t even place an order.
free bart on spare the air mornings is a good intention.
Providing more parking is a better idea. Here is the reasoning why:
That means every extra driver added by a free bart incentive displaces an existing user of BART. There is no net reduction in cars on the road, only a displacement of some existing riders.
Milbrae/San Bruno to San Francisco ridership is 40% below the “goal”. They charge $2/day for parking at San Bruno and now at Colma. That has something to do with it.
According to the Transportation and Land Use Coalition (TALC) BART summary, BART parking costs $1/day and they recommend charging for parking rather than increasing fares or reducing services.
Well, BART has both increased fares and has reduced services. Remember there used to be restrooms in san francisco, berkeley, and oakland? Now there aren’t. The first reason, “due to orange alert level”. When the security alert was reduced to “yellow”, then the reason was due to “heightened security level”. Now there is no reason at all. Bathrooms are just closed regardless.
What is “fair evaluation”?
You want to be able to determine without experiencing it yourself (saving time, trouble, cost, pain, suffering, etc.) the qualities of an experience that are important to you.
An experience in the general sense means a service provided by a person, device, institution, etc. Such as health care, insurance, entertainment, dining.
Some aspect of experience is subjective and different individuals will rate differently. Other aspects of experience such as price and time, incident occurence (such as failure) could be thought of as objective, but different individuals will rate differently due to memory recall error, variation of experiences over time with the same service.
Statistical correctness is one aspect of fairness — that ratings are not biased one way or other, or if they are, that bias can be noted so the end-user can evaluate.
Coverage is another aspect — if you are rating x,y,z and leave out a,b,c which are measurably better than x,y,z, you’ve limited information. The decider may be unaware of a,b,c because no information is provided about them. On the other hand, we can argue that if a,b,c are worse than x,y,z, then the decider’s situation is not any worse if no information is provided about a,b,c. I.e. information regarding good experiences is better than information bad experiences.
Perhaps a fair evaluation is one that tells the author’s biases and experiences more verbally in addition to or instead of a number ranking.
Here’s an example of bad experiences (and the requisite comparison of good experience):
My personal experience with Mills-Peninsula medical group has been inconsistent. For some services, I have received “marginally acceptable” treatment — a physical that took heart and blood tests and “come and see me again in N [N > 1] years”.
For other services, I have received questionable treatment. Surgery without a second opinion is always risky, but then again, the risk is due to the variance of doctor competence in diagnosis. A second diagnosis is more like a comparison of (and search for) physician competence rather than a “vote” on the recommended treatment. You could say that some physicians are consistently more competent than others, such that for certain good physicians you don’t need a second opinion. I.e. successfully treated patients are the evidence — if such information could ever be made publically searchable.
My wife’s experience with Mills-Peninsula ER team has been fairly poor the one time she was taken to the ER after passing out after having blood drawn. In Dr. Google’s estimation, she experienced syncope. Now that in itself is no reason to be alarmed about the quality of health care at Mills Peninsula. However, when in the ER (which she was for over 2 hours), no diagnostic tests other than listening to the heart with a stethoscope were performed on her. However, 4 more vials of blood were drawn to complete the blood test panel. The blood was continued to be drawn from her while she was sitting up even though Dr. Google recommends to lie down for blood drawing
Here’s some symptoms and search-engine-driven diagnosis: * Her blood pressure was 90 over 60 and later 107 over 70. The blood pressure was taken from different arms. Dr. Google thinks this is somewhat significant. The ER doctor didn’t ask about such in their observations. * In another reference, Dr. Google states that “Although the yield of electrocardiography is low (5%), the test is risk free and relatively inexpensive. … Electrocardiography is therefore recommended in almost all patients with syncope”. However, no EKG was performed during the 2+ hours in the ER. Such a test takes no more than 10 minutes of pasting on electrodes and letting the computer run. Instead the ER folks persisted in taking the rest of the blood samples. * There is a family history of fainting in her immediate family. Again, no such questions were asked although patients with a suggestive history should get more testing..
You can’t expect ER (triage) doctors to know everything. But you might reasonably ask how sick do you have to be to get attentive treatment by a knowledgable doctor? i.e. the process of treatment by Mills Peninsula is somewhat lacking in depth or conclusion.
Here’s an example of a good experience:
After over one year of wound care after surgical removal of a retrorectal abscess with a wound that still wouldn’t heal and before an upcoming third surgery with no planned presurgical tests or communicated surgical plan, I got a “second opinion” at UCSF where I was scanned with an MRI to determine that a tiny hole in rectum (perhaps newly appeared) was causing the chronic infection preventing the wound from healing. I had originally asked for an MRI two years earlier before the initial surgery, but Mills Peninsula only had CT scan facility. This in itself isn’t a bad mark against mills peninsula, but reluctance to refer to a more capable facility is one bad mark. Dr. Google thinks MRI is slightly better than CT scans.
When I was examined initially at UCSF, the first person I saw wasn’t even a doctor, but a second year medical student. She interviewed me for about 30 minutes to take a complete medical history of the particular condition I was asking treatment for. This goes to show that experience does not necessarily indicate quality, but process is an indication of quality. i.e. inexperienced, but following a good process (of detailed interview) produces a good experience and I think a good result.
You can infer from these comparisons that I prefer UCSF over Mills-Peninusla. I have hope for a good treatment result. I also expect to have my wife see a cardiologist there about her fainting.